My PhD Thesis

MY PhD THESIS (On Artificial Brains)

I was a mid career switcher. I started doing a PhD thesis rather later in life (i.e. at 40, in 1987). My first year was rather wasted on doing machine learning related to supervised learning and all in LISP. I then got interested in genetic algorithms and neural networks, and had the idea of combining them. I had seen a few papers on the evolution of static neural nets, but noone at the time as far as I know had thought of the idea of evolving dynamic neural nets, i.e. nets whose outputs changed with time, and thus could be used to control dynamic behaviors. If I could evolve one behavior, I could evolve a whole library of them. I could also evolve pattern detectors, and link them via logic circuits to make a network of evolved neural networks, or as I called such things “artificial brains”. My work in the 1990s and 2000s on artificial brains thus developed from my original ideas from my PhD thesis.

John Koza and I began using the term Genetic Programming (GP) independently in 1990.
I no longer use this term, due to confusion created by Koza’s use of GP.
For the past few years I have been using the term
“Evolutionary Engineering” to describe my work.